![]() Do you get this a lot? People feeling like they’ve ‘discovered’ you? Or is it just me? ![]() And yes I know it was probably fed to me by an algorithm (without me knowing it) but the point is I bought it and read it and loved it and it felt a bit like an LP I found at the bottom of a pile in a used record store in 1986. I *like* that no one recommended your book to me at a dinner party. In a weird way your writing felt like a secret discovery for me and I think this ‘becoming aware’ thing was/is part of it. I just sort of became aware of you somehow. I was trying to think how I came across you and your work and the weird thing is I don’t actually know. So broke this week I panicked and applied to be the sex and relationships writer for Cosmopolitan UK and I didn’t even get a call back… the cheek! There’s a cost of living crisis and I’m broke. ![]() If you enjoy the interview - and obviously you will - please do me a solid and subscribe. And bless her, she clambered up! If this is the first you’ve heard of Lauren Hough, all I can say is YOU ARE WELCOME. Because I’m newly obsessed by her work, I asked her a series of in-depth, overly-intense, at times tangential questions figuring she’d either dismiss me out of hand, answer in monosyllables or maybe just maybe join me on the same weird overly-intense tangential plane. I’ve honestly never really done an interview quite like it. Listen to me now: You just have to read it.Īnd the same goes for my Q & A with her below. Plus she’s a die hard Dixie Chicks fan and in addition to her brilliant memoir, a hilarious (if agonised and ambivalent) Tweeter as well as the author of Bad Reads a compulsive and hilarious Substack that’s about, well, whatever weird random shit is on her mind. Also back in the 90s she was court-marshalled by the US military who accused her of fire-bombing her own car for the insurance money during the 'don’t-ask-don’t-tell’ era. Also the minor detail that she was raised in a religious abuse and sex cult, the Children of God, that trafficked Hough and countless other blameless child ‘members’ across the globe, robbing her of an education, a name, sense of self, yet somehow, inexplicably, leaving her immense writing talent in tact. She’s been an Air Force Airman, a green-aproned barista, a bouncer, a bartender, and, for a time, a cable guy.”įair enough, but that leaves out the not insignificant fact that she’s a six-foot-tall lesbian dog-owner who lives in Austin, Texas, has won a bunch of literary awards and can single-handedly (sort of) fix up a dodgy old van. She was born in Berlin, Germany, and raised in seven countries, and Amarillo, Texas. ![]() Oooohkey, so here to start? According to the bio on her author site, “Lauren is a New York Times Best Selling author and essayist. She’s one of those rare writers whose background and work are difficult to describe without sounding like a deranged fabulist but allow me to try. Lauren Hough is flat out, but dull she is not. Because it reminds me that true originality is still alive and well in a world where so much of what’s out there often feels formulaic, derivative or just flat out dull. And when that happens, I stagger to my feet, heart-soaring and do a little drunken Irish jig down the road. AND YET every once in a while I stumble across a writer who truly refuses to be slotted, whose work, subject, style, voice, turn-of-phrase, punctuation, whatever - tickles me under the chin then right-hooks me sideways leaving me speechless in the gutter, concussed for days. “Defies categorisation” has become its own stupidly vague category of late, which renders the term a meaningless at best and at worst an inexcusable cliche.
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